There is a need to automatically and accurately track the amount of time a person or object spends interacting or associating with other people or objects. This association information may be used for accounting purposes, for worker payroll, to bill a customer, or to log the “work expended” on a given object or by a given person. Alternatively, the information may be used for inventory records, equipment utilization studies, event precipitation and similar uses. Unfortunately, the accuracy of today's object association systems is inadequate. Conventional object association systems require estimates to capture the amount of time devices spend interacting. For example, it is quite common to estimate the amount of time that an expensive piece of medical equipment was used during a procedure. Since medical equipment can generate millions of dollars a year in bills corresponding to the time the equipment is operated, a small inaccuracy in estimation of the time of operation has a big impact on either the payer or the payee. Accordingly, it is becoming more common for medical insurance companies to demand exact time recordings of the usage of particular equipment. Since this requires human oversight, the process becomes very burdensome for the medical staff.
The need for humans to initiate conventional object association systems represents a major difficulty with the systems. This requirement for manual interaction, typically to start and stop timers or record times, results in inaccurate readings that can be subject to fraud. Some people simply forget to start or stop the timers, especially when they have multiple tasks to perform, or they just estimate the time to keep things simpler. In most cases they do not stop the timers when they take small breaks and this leads to inaccurate readings. In some cases, people start or stop the time tracking system fraudulently which results in inaccurate billing. Additionally, tracking the time that objects spend interacting is not possible since the objects, absent an interface with a timer, can not start a timer, a person needs to be involved in some way. Unfortunately conventional association systems are not designed to determine and log associations automatically without human intervention.
Conventional object association systems fail to track multiple tasks, either sequentially or simultaneously. In “time clock” type systems, if there are multiple objects or tasks to be tracked there must be multiple timers. These timers can track when a human operator notes that two devices begin to interact, but the problem rapidly becomes too complex to record if there are multiple devices interacting with other devices. Conventional wireless tether systems are limited to noting when two devices are close to each other, they can not deal with multiple interactions starting and stopping. The location system solutions simply show that multiple devices are in the same space, they do not show which is interacting with another nor the times of these interactions as they have difficulty in determining interaction detail. Additionally, most current systems do not have the ability to automatically and continuously track object interactions, such as tracking the progress of a piece of work in process (WIP) and the time it spends interacting with various tools and people, in order to make that information available in “real time” to an interested party. Without this ability to review real-time object association data, supervisors or systems have difficulty in quickly recognizing problems in a production flow.